GlassFish Server Open Source Edition will remain the reference implementation of Java EE. The current trunk is where an implementation for Java EE 8 will flourish, and this will become the future GlassFish 5.0. Calling "GlassFish is dead" does no good to the Java EE ecosystem. The GlassFish Community will remain strong towards the future of Java EE. Without revenue-focused mind, this might actually help the GlassFish community to shape the next version, and set free from any ties with commercial decisions.

Fact #2 - OGS support is not over

As I said before, GlassFish Server Open Source Edition will continue. Main change is that there will be no more future commercial releases of Oracle GlassFish Server. New and existing OGS 2.1.x and 3.1.x commercial customers will continue to be supported according to the Oracle Lifetime Support Policy. In parallel, I believe there's no other company in the Java EE business that offers commercial support to more than one build of a Java EE application server. This new direction can actually help customers and partners, simplifying decision through commercial negotiations.

Fact #3 - WebLogic is not always more expensive than OGS

Oracle GlassFish Server ("OGS") is a build of GlassFish Server Open Source Edition bundled with a set of commercial features called GlassFish Server Control and license bundles such as Java SE Support. OGS has at the moment of this writing the pricelist of U$ 5,000 / processor. One information that some bloggers are mentioning is that WebLogic is more expensive than this. Fact 3.1: it is not necessarily the case. The initial edition of WebLogic is called "Standard Edition" and falls into a policy where some “Standard Edition” products are licensed on a per socket basis. As of current pricelist, US$ 10,000 / socket. If you do the math, you will realize that WebLogic SE can actually be significantly more cost effective than OGS, and a customer can save money if running on a CPU with 4 cores or more for example. Quote from the price list:

“When licensing Oracle programs with Standard Edition One or Standard Edition in the product name (with the exception of Java SE Support, Java SE Advanced, and Java SE Suite), a processor is counted equivalent to an occupied socket; however, in the case of multi-chip modules, each chip in the multi-chip module is counted as one occupied socket.”

For more details speak to your Oracle sales representative - this is clearly at list price and every customer typically has a relationship with Oracle (like they do with other vendors) and different contractual details may apply.

There are no major vendors providing support for community builds of any Open Source application server. For example, IBM used to provide community support for builds of Apache Geronimo, not anymore. Red Hat does not commercially support builds of WildFly and if I remember correctly, never supported community builds of former JBoss AS. Oracle has never commercially supported GlassFish Server Open Source Edition builds. Tomitribe appears to be the exception to the rule, offering commercial support for Apache TomEE.

WebLogic is closed-source offering. It is commercialized through a license-based plus support fee model. OGS although from an Open Source code, has had the same commercial model as WebLogic. Still, one cannot compare GlassFish/WebLogic to WildFly/JBoss EAP. It is simply not the same case, since Oracle has had two different products from different codebases. The comparison should be limited to GlassFish Open Source / Oracle GlassFish Server versus WildFly / JBoss EAP.

But the message now is much clear: Oracle will commercially support only the proprietary product WebLogic, and invest on GlassFish Server Open Source Edition as the reference implementation for the Java EE platform and future Java EE 8, as a developer-friendly community distribution, and encourages community participation through Adopt a JSR and contributions to GlassFish.

Some users are saying they will now move to WildFly, but it is important to note that Red Hat does not offer commercial support for WildFly builds. Although the future JBoss EAP versions will come from the same codebase as WildFly, the builds will definitely not be the same, nor sharing 100% of their functionalities and bug fixes. This means there will be no company running a WildFly build in production with support from Red Hat.

GlassFish Server Open Source Edition isn’t dead. Current and new OGS 2.x/3.x customers will continue to have support (respecting LSP). WebLogic is not necessarily more expensive than OGS. Oracle will focus on one commercially supported Java EE application server, like other vendors also limit themselves to support one build/product only. Community builds are hardly supported. Commercially supported builds of Open Source products are not exactly from the same codebase as community builds.

What's next for GlassFish and the Java EE community?

There are conversations in place to tackle some of the community desires, most of them stated by Markus Eisele in his blog post. We will keep you posted.

WebLogic is free for Developers through OTN License. If your production environment is WebLogic, it is reasonable to develop using it. But WLS supports GlassFish deployment descriptor for standard Java EE applications as well.

The problem with Glassfish being only a RI is that usually the devs creating RIs doesn't fix performance and security issues -since a RI only must to comply with the spec. I wonder if such problems will be leaved unresolved in the code of Glassfish in the future.

GlassFish will remain alive to help developers understand the Java EE platform,
and also will let community shape it for something beyond the RI
(performance/security issues as you say).

From a production, serious business perspective, Oracle will focus on only one
product which is WebLogic, as stated in this blog. And as I said, this product
can be more cost effective than the commercially supported Oracle GlassFish
Server. For customers this is a good thing, when the team is putting 100% of
its energy into only one product, just like any other vendor.

I get, and even like, Oracle's logic in focusing on one product. Wish they'd do so throughout all their product lines, as we'd likely see better software.

My only object comes from the risk of developing on OpenSource Glassfish and deploying on WebLogic. Introduces additional QA risks, as the two will behave differently as they progress in different directions. And certainly not planning to develop on WebLogic, as it's just to heavy-weight to justify a place in my desktop environment.

Still considering my options going forward: 1) develop on the cloud; 2) bundle my own web server with my delivered apps (likely TomcatEE), with integration to WLS (yeah, this option probably sucks); 3) chuck the whole thing and make a living as an OBI consultant (OK, that was sarcasm...but only a little).

Xavier, where developing on GlassFish and deploying on WebLogic makes the most sense is when you begin developing an app that uses Java EE 7 features available on GlassFish 4.0 today, and then you later deploy on WebLogic as Java EE 7 features become available, beginning with WebLogic 12.1.3.

Now that I've fully digested my first Dr. Pepper of the day, my take is a bit different from that posted earlier. The question arises "why should I care about this? Maybe I should just develop using WebLogic on the cloud (as a service) and just stop worrying about this particular issue." The more I think about it, the better that sounds.

The problem with this analysis, and the comparison of Oracle to Redhat or the previous actions of IBM, is that Oracle is RESPONSIBLE for JEE (and its future success). Neither Redhat or IBM was in that position and so could make decisions based purely on commercials. Oracle, by making this decision has weakened JEE (whether you choose to admit it or not), because as a result there are going to be fewer organisations planning on using full JEE (and the latest) in production because you can't do that without spending big bucks. Fewer organisations means lower quality, reduced mindshare, weak communities.

We have been using JEE since day dot and Glassfish has been fantastic because we knew we could use it in production (because the big guys are) and IF we needed support we could pay for it and get it. Now we are in the situation that nobody will be using it in production and we can't get support for it. You telling us that everything is rosy and fine is ridiculous.

What this practically means for us is that the one-stop shop for the tech stack we need, i.e. JEE has lost all of its value. It might have everything we need (and love) but we can't run it in production. The strategy for us now is to invest in building a tech stack that we can support ourselves and go prod without paying Oracle money.

@Bruno: is there even a notable community effort in GlassFish nowadays? Could you give some numbers about the distribution of code contributions?

I had a look into GF's source code a couple of times and honestly: I was disappointed about the code quality, think of swallowed exceptions making it hard to debug user issues. Personally I'd really ponder if I'd invest into this code base. Admittedly I didn't look into other server's code though. The comparison of JBoss/Wildfly seems to be a bit unfair, in my understanding the commercially backed version will stay the same code base as the community product in the future.

So if you say, that Oracle's focus is 100% WL and the community can drive GF beyond RI I think you only confirm that it will die. At least it will probably be rendered unusable for production usage. And I know quite a few companies using GF in production without commercial support.

To me, start ups that use Community Glassfish (it's performance is not bad) for their stack can't rely on Glassfish being around since Oracle could still pull it at any time, and it will probably start suffering performance and slow bug fix issues since the community is likely to disappear or shrink. Granted you can pay for JBoss support, but WildFly when it was Community JBoss was still used in production by companies using an open source stack (I worked at a place with a couple hundred people). They didn't care about paying for support since the community is large and active. I think Glassfish Community proponents will drift to WildFly. And if and when those smaller companies that do "make it" and get bigger, and if they want commercial support, they will go to JBoss because that is what they are used to. They won't go to WebLogic, because there is nothing tying them to Oracle any more. Nor do they want to pay the ridiculous prices Oracle charges (5 grand a processor... give me a break... when even home PCs and laptops are coming out with 8 cores now). I am a former Glassfish user as of today and will retool with WildFly. So much for a good thing. Oracle borks everything. As younger programmers come of age and start running things, Oracle will disappear. Because those people are sick of what Oracle does and how much it charges they avoid it. So they will use what they know, JBoss, PostreSQL, MariaDB, etc. Have a good day.

In my case, there is a legal constraint, that has enabled the use of glassfish, i work in a government organization, and we develop and deploy JavaEE6 applications on glassfish 3.

By law (wich i don't agree but it doesnt't matters now), we must use open source sotfware. So with glassfish we had open source and commercial support. But we can't use WebLogic. I probably must migrate to JBoss when we begin to develop new JavaEE7 applications.

In my opinion, if the argument of going with a commercially supported Open Source product is limited to only and solely because one can "look" at the source code, then there's nothing else to arguee, and it is naturally a victory to the Open Source product.

If the argument is about freedom, that you can choose a commercially supported Open Source product, pay for support if you want/need, and if you want you can stop paying support and keep running that software, it is important to note that several vendors do not allow this. Red Hat is one of them. It is not allowed to run JBoss EAP in production without a support contract. It is in their Terms & Conditions. WildFly does not provide the same QA as EAP, and there's no guarantee that a fixed bug in EAP will be backported to WildFly. In the end, is the same as a Closed Source product, except that you may not be able to look at the source.

If the argument is about price, then this is bad for both Open Source and Closed Source products. But I think it will be worse for the Open Source commercially supported product and the company supporting it. One day this will affect their business and sooner or later, they will stop providing support, simply because no one is buying support.

Finally, if the argument is about quality of the product, then it doesn't matter if it is open or closed, but feature wise, and several closed source products are as good, or better, as the open source commercially supported alternatives.

Now, of course this discussion is useless if we are talking about Governments and laws... :-) Private industry is much more flexible and open for negotiations/discussions than public sector due to these kind of policies.

The intent of my comment was to inform a context where glassfish can not be chosen (ok it's particular but it's real). We can not put into production an application without vendor support, and without having an own development team that can keep the code and support the production applications (something that should be key if you have a law that requires us to use free or open source software, but unfortunately, not so much in the name of independence we agree to not use commercial software, but we can have staff to provide in-depth knowledge in the community).

One thing about the legal constraint, if we have appropiate arguments we can have an exception to use commercial software (now a days exceptions are Oracle DB, WebLogic server, and some MS desktop products). So one alternative we have, in case we started using JavaEE7 (that is something i am particulary interested especially because HTML5 capabilities, websockets and batch processing ) its to start develop applications in weblogic and have a project to migrate JavaEE6 apps to WebLogic. And my point here is that an Oracle decision have a cost impact in clients (migration related cost ).

Although we will migrate to WebLogic, I still consider Glassfish the best choice (i've tunned and i support more than 2000 concurrent users and 80000 http request / hour without performance problems)

From Oracle perspective perhaps it's perhaps the best option to put all the effort of comercial support just in one tool. But now I have a extra cost, that its evaluate the migration from GF to WL and I don't have any argument against that, I'm just trying to evaluate the impact in an organization like mine of Glassfish announcement.

FYI: LogiCoy has been providing and will continue to provide commercial production (24x7)support for all of the open source versions of GlassFish V2.1.x, V3.x,... Our engineers are the original and developers and architects of GlassFish and GlassFish ESB. So, if there is a desire to not migrate to Weblogic or other closed source app servers and continue to run the existing or future open source versions of GlassFish in production environments with 24x7 support and up to 1 hour SLAs, you may contact info@logicoy.com.

Red Hat is committed to WildFly and JBoss EAP. The community is absolutely thriving, the open source edition is frequently used in production knowing that commercial support is coming with JBoss EAP. They do share the same code base making the migration smoother unlike GlassFish/WebLogic where only some components are shared, with different integration points to the core kernel in each container.

WebLogic is a monolithic closed-source product with no early access to builds. You'll have to wait for the release before you can try to start developing your apps. WildFly is modular, lightweight, open-source application server that can be used for development using CI/promoted/released builds and migrated to JBoss EAP for commercial support when its released.

@Xavier,

Different development and deployment are a nightmare for devops. WildFly and JBoss EAP share the same code base and so minimizes the risk and still giving you the opportunity to play with the latest technology.

@Arturo,

WebLogic 12.1.3 provide piecemeal approach to Java EE 7, just like its predecessors did for Java EE 6. So even though GlassFish offers a full compliance with Java EE 7 but that does not mean your app will deploy on 12.1.3 as is. You'll have to wait for 12.1.4 for complete Java EE 7 compliance.

@Floyd,

AFAIK WebLogic deployment in cloud is only offered by Oracle Public Cloud (OPC). That is based on WebLogic 11g which is only Java EE 5 compliant. OPC again offers a piecemeal approach to Java EE 6 with some technologies supported on top of 11g, but not fully certified or compliant. For example, EJBs in a WAR is not supported. Similarly CDI is such a crucial component of Java EE 6 is not supported there. Just be aware of these limitations before you start looking at WebLogic in the Cloud development/deployment options.

@Bertrand, +1 on WildFly/JBoss comparison. They do share the same code base unlike GlassFish/WebLogic where, once again piecemeal components, are shared.

@Bruno, I think your example about "stop providing support" refers to GlassFish because Red Hat is 100% committed to WildFly and providing commercial support on JBoss EAP. Oracle has killed many open source products, for their right reasons, but that's not in the DNA of Red Hat. Definitely not for the most successful open source application server.

IMO the DNA of Red Hat isn't really about Open Source community. It is about Open Source as a business model. If in the worse case Red Hat has an insufficient number of commercially support customers, there won't be enough resources (money) to invest in their Open Source projects and so, commercial support might be at risk.

I cheer for Red Hat as much as I cheer for Java technologies, but it is a company, not an Apache-like foundation and it can change the course if needed.

I like very much GF4 and I was already developing JEE7 apps with it. I have never used WebLogic, I fear that the same binary EAR that I deploy in GF4 so easy it would not deploy in WebLogic that easy, for example configuring JAAS is configured different.

I really would like GF4 with commercial support, WebLogic is expensive for small business (about $5,000 - $9,000?)

@Bruno
why do you sound pissed by @Arun comment and you reply by this ..
At the moment, if GlassFish is to be called a toy project, so is WildFly.
@Bruno
Quite interesting on the path Oracle takes first Hudson, then GlassFish ,does it mean we will just have to wait for a couple of four more years and they drop Netbeans IDE for their ADF XML IDES.
Why dont they donate the aplication to Apache or a company that can offer support on the development side and developers can produce a
commercially and opensource application on the same codebase but only pay a licence if one needs support but Glassfish to be still be the implementation for Java EE 7 and higher cause with the trend of Oracle JEE will also be paid for in comming years.

WebLogic costs 10 times at least what JBoss EAP costs. There are some start ups that *will* use WildFly for commercial use. It is readily apparent that you have only worked for a large company(s) and have never worked for or with startups; but startups DO NOT have the money to pay for even JBoss licenses, and they need to start making money somehow. However, they will start with the free as in beer version and if successful will pay for the commercial license going forward. Now if they start with WildFly, where do you think they will go from there? To an app server that costs 10 or 20 thousand per year (JBoss) and is 100% compatible with their code base; or an app server that costs hundreds of thousands and requires a lot of recoding to shoehorn in their code base (WebLogic or WebSphere)?

As far as 'free developer's licenses go': they are as useless as tits on a boar. If you can't use your code anywhere except your own machine, it is useless. So why bother, except if you are at school. And none of these companies is going to make money from students.

There is no need for an official handoff by Oracle to another group. Open source projects can get supported by other vendors that have engineers that know the code. LogiCoy has been providing and will continue to provide commercial production (24x7)support for all of the open source versions of GlassFish V2.1.x, V3.x,... Our engineers are the original and developers and architects of GlassFish and GlassFish ESB. So, if there is a desire to not migrate to Weblogic or other closed source app servers and continue to run the existing or future open source versions of GlassFish in production environments with 24x7 support and up to 1 hour SLAs, you may contact info@logicoy.com. We have many high profile customers that have been and are currently using our 24x7 commercial support programs for GlassFish and GlassFish ESB for the past 5 years. Please see http://logicoy.com/support

@FredAabedi it is obvious from Oracle's moves that aside *maybe* from a reference implementation, Glassfish is going to disappear. They don't want anything that could possibly take away from their commercial offerings. Most people are beginning to suspect that continuing to use Netbeans is a mistake. I certainly am switching to Eclipse even though Netbeans is superior. In future Glassfish if it still exists will not be of use in commercial ventures. That is my opinion. Oracle has just marginalized another segment of the Java community.

Absolutely. Even though I work for Red Hat so the opinion would be biased. But technically speaking JBoss EAP is derived from WildFly unlike GlassFish/WebLogic which share only some implementations. As a software vendor, using JBoss EAP will makes me lot more comfortable knowing that Red Hat will not pull the plug on it unlike Oracle on GlassFish commercial, Open Office, Hudson, and others.

The equivalent of GlassFish 4 for WebLogic 12c (currently 12.1.2) is still in development. Full Java EE 7 might be supported by Weblogic perhaps in 12.1.4 or another version; 12.1.3 might come with some Java EE 7 APIs). And as I stated in this blog post, the cost of WebLogic is not necessarily always higher than GlassFish. WebLogic Standard Edition can be cheaper than GlassFish was, and great for certain types of applications (the ones that don't actually need clustered objects - EJBs - for example).

@Dan,

I can't speak for other products, but I can mention that the Hudson incident was a different thing. A lot of misunderstandings and miscommunications led to the fork (and later the donation for Eclipse Foundation). I suggest you Google for this, specially in the jug-leaders mailing list archive.

@BillR,

WebLogic does not cost 10 times what EAP costs simply because you get more than a simple Java EE Application Server implementation when you buy Oracle WebLogic. As you can see here [http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/cloud-app-foundation/weblogic/weblogicserver-ds-1212-1-v8-1969975.pdf] WebLogic also gives the customer support for several other products such as: the Oracle JVM, WebTier (which includes an Apache build by Oracle called Oracle HTTP Server and the WebLogic Plugin), Java Mission Control, the frameworks Oracle ADF and ADF Mobile, JMS Clustering and Advanced Messaging Features, Diagnostic Framework and Work Managers, Dynamic Clustering, WLST, HA, RAC Integration, Optimization for Exalogic, etc, etc... It is an unfair comparison by simply saying it is 10x more expensive because it comes with much more value-added, starting with the very feature rich Web Admin Console. Finally, please keep in mind that price is always negotiable with local sales reps.

Looking at how WildFly might have security issues like JBoss Community did (CVE-4810) and is unsupported by Red Hat, a responsible developer, even from a Startup, should never deploy it in production. And then what option does he has? JBoss EAP, paid for production environments, just like WebLogic. So what's the point of argueeing that WildFly is free and etc? Would you use a buggy, unsafe, and unsupported software in production? Red Hat Security team admits as stated by Red Hat's partner that QA for EAP is very different, and several fixes are not backported as already stated by many community mambers in the blogosphere. This is of course how Red Hat plans to motivate WildFly users to move to EAP as soon as possible: to get security fixes.

@Arun,

As you are comfortable, I'm also comfortable to know that Oracle will not pull the plug on WebLogic. Focusing developers in one single application server is great for WebLogic customers who will now get even more quicker access to new Java EE 7 features and several other improvements. They are customers and also deserve that. I'm sure Red Hat also understands the value of supporting customers.

--- conclusion ---

Running any software without support in production offers risk, specially application servers, just like JBoss AS (WildFly) did with its Invoker bug. This slide [http://www.vizuri.com/insights/blog/2013/07/jboss-community-vs-enterprise-comparison] of Red Hat's partner comparing JBoss EAP and JBoss Community (WildFly) explains pretty well the differences between what one "doesn't get" with paid support, and what one might get with unsupported application server.

I just hope that everyone understands the value of paid support (either by license+support or subscription). "Open Source is not free", said David Blevins from Tomitribe/TomEE. But I think the arguments usually put on table this past weeks are weak: arguments that WildFly should be considered as an alternative for GlassFish/WebLogic simply because WildFly is free for production, and the codebase for EAP, and that in case of future wish for support migration might be easier. Weak arguments, not aligned with what really matters.

One obvious impact from the hole story is that GF 4.0.1 is now long overdue, even though we were told the next minor update would come soon. 4.0 was rushed out, but just has LOTS of minor and not so minor issues that need to be resolved.

Will it ever come? Or is everything now left in the hands of "the community", whoever that is? (BTW, not to bash Oracle exclusively here, I've been stuck in a similar situation with JBoss AS 7.1 before...)

This, to me, signals the end of Oracle as we know it - or return to Oracle as we knew it. Oralcle will not be a standard bearer of the open-source community but simply a giant corporation peddling its wares to other giant corporations (very good things in business so don't get me wrong on that).

It will be years, yet, to manifest but Oracle has never embraced open source. They bite the hand that feeds them - even when it is their own hand. How long before they quit supporting java because they can't charge for it?

Open source has been the lifeblood of the java, linux, apache community upon which Oracle depends. When Oracle breaks that trusted relationship, then developers may as well turn to other partners that they would not have considered before. Reminds me of the recent move by Charmin (toilet paper) where they reduced the size of their TP sheet by 15%. All that did is make their loyal base try other products they wouldn't have otherwise tried.

This is not about Oracle dropping support for Glassfish. This is about Oracle trying to kill the open-source competitor - even when it is them. Open source will still exist. They can't kill it. Glassfish will still exist. The relationship with the community and the many thousands of developers won't exist.

Now, when our open-source installations grow to require enterprise support, we will have no loyalty to Oracle. We won't necessarily choose to partner with them. We'll try the Northern and the Soft-and-Gentle versions, too. In fact, we may try the other things and leave Charmin... I mean Oracle.. out of the trials completely; we don't trust them anymore.

Buying up, absorbing, and throwing out the rubbish of competitors is a long tradition in business. But this move doesn't eliminate competitors; it doesn't have the benefits of such buyouts. This move just breaks the trust and the relationship with the community. Time will tell how that works out for them.

"Quite interesting on the path Oracle takes first Hudson, then GlassFish ,does it mean we will just have to wait for a couple of four more years and they drop Netbeans IDE for their ADF XML IDES."

No, it won't happen. Netbeans has a bigger user base than Oracle jDeveloper. Plus, jDeveloper has been moved to run atop the Netbeans Platform. So in that case Netbeans has engulfed JDeveloper (which was closed source freeware to begin with).

Dale wrote: "Oralcle will not be a standard bearer of the open-source community but simply a giant corporation peddling its wares to other giant corporations (very good things in business so don't get me wrong on that). It will be years, yet, to manifest but Oracle has never embraced open source."

Classic FUD. Ellison created and promoted the Oracle ThinkNIC $250 computer back in y2000, fourteen years ago. It was a system that booted Linux from an internal CD-rom, and was sold as an educational computer.

OracleLinux is doing fine, as well as OpenJDK, with more players than ever joining it, from SAP to RedHat to IBM to Twitter. And all that happened because of Oracle's steering of the platform and investment on it.

Yet I see the usual "damned if they do, damned if they don't" doomsday preachers time and time again. If they keep control of projects it's "Oracle's iron grip", if others join it, then it's "others had to step in given Oracle's lack of action and lack of interest..."

So far my experience of Glassfish has been very disappointing. Since I want to stick as much as possible to standard java architecture in my applications (JSF, GLassfish, Netbeans), I'm going to assume that there is a flaw in my approach which is leading to the problems I am experiencing. Hopefully this forum will clear up a basic question - is there an end to end tutorial on how to create a simple form based login application using JDBC connection pooling and Netbeans IDE? This should include end to end configuration and NO INVISIBLE SHORTCUTS! Many of the tutorials I've seen make sweeping assumptions without providing explanations (eg: 'configure your server according to the GlassFish user guide' - there's so many configuration options that this kind of statement is almost meaningless).

Either Glassfish is such a complicated architecture that there is no generic way to create simple applications OR testing end to end applications on the open source edition has been sporadic.

In addition to that, the server often becomes slow, unstable and needs to be reinstalled. This is in a development environment so I'm not sure how it would perform under the more intense use in a production environment.

I can't think of another reason or justification why anybody with at least basic knowledge of JEE would have to spend days tinkering with settings to deploy a very simple application. I'm going to be patient and open minded. It was much easier and more practical to work in Tomcat. Maybe JBoss is the better option for small scale enterprise apps and GF is only good for very large apps involving very complex configuration and customization? I'm going to persevere and keep and open mind. Any suggestions or recommendations about successfully learning and deploying Glassfish would be appreciated. Otherwise I'm moving to more 'practical' technologies! Thank you!!